How weird would that be in your actual day-to-day? Well, it's real, and a bank in the United States is rolling out this sort of system to its customer call centres, as American Banker's Penny Crosman reports.

First Horizon Bank is opting for this system as a way to keep its call centre agents relaxed over long shifts of dealing with the public—I get it, people can be horrible. The bank hopes the system could help deal with burnout among agents.

It all relies on Cisco's AI model for call centres, Webex Contact Center—after all, only AI could make something so intrinsically weird. It requires monitoring of an agent's stress levels through various markers, including responses to customers. Cisco says this information isn't retained. 

Altogether, the system is able to piece together a picture of an agent's day-to-day stress level.

"Different people basically break at different breakpoints," Aruna Ravichandran, SVP and customer officer at Webex by Cisco, says to American Banker.

When an agent is close to their breaking point, the system recognises this and runs—I can't believe this is actually what this is called—a Thrive Reset.

A Thrive Reset is a montage of personal photos, set to music, with inspirational quotes. Thankfully, agents pick their own photos and songs—it might be a little too bleak for an AI to generate some fake family vacation snaps set to Tiny Tim's Tiptoe Through the Tulips. 

Have you seen the Apple TV original Severance? It's the equivalent of the egg bar social.

At this point in writing this story, I assume this is entirely made up. There's no way it's called a Thrive Reset, I tell myself. Alas, the videos are made by very real 'productivity and health platform', Thrive Global. And yep, Thrive Global integrates with Webex Contact Center. And just to be extra sure, Ravichandran is a real person, too.

And, apparently, the system works. That's the thing I can't really get my head around. It sounds awful, but in a number of trials, First Horizon saw at least double digit reductions in levels of burnout in agents. In other pilot schemes for so-called Thrive Resets, agents preferred this sort of break to just having some free time. Customer satisfaction also increased a couple of percentage points.

Trialled earlier in the year, and with plans to roll out the system even further by March, First Horizon Bank should have the system handing out montages to 3,000 agents by now.

So, if agents are happier and customers are happier, who am I to turn my nose up at this burgeoning AI use case? Nope, sorry, this is all too alternate timeline Corporate America for me. I prefer getting my workplace rage out the traditional way: bottling it up until I can buy a new overpriced item of clothing or gadget to give me a fleeting sense of control over my own life. 

Phew, that's better.

On an average day about a dozen new games are released on Steam. And while we think that's a good thing, it can be understandably hard to keep up with. Potentially exciting gems are sure to be lost in the deluge of new things to play unless you sort through every single game that is released on Steam. So that’s exactly what we’ve done. If nothing catches your fancy this week, we've gathered the best PC games you can play right now and a running list of the 2024 games that are launching this year. 

Troma Presents Poultrygeist

Steam‌ ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ June 11
Developer:‌ Big Weasel Lil Weasel LLC, Mike Fallek

Troma is a cult film company specialising in schlocky comedy horror, and Poultrygeist (the game) is a sequel of sorts to the 2006 film Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead. As you have probably gathered by now, the satire here is far from sophisticated. In fact, it's dumb as shit! That's the Troma way. This sequel-as-game is a visual novel about "the murder of a chicken and destruction of a lawn mower that teeters the city closer to a riot and an even more powerful looming magical threat." Notwithstanding any aversion to the visual novel as a genre, I cannot imagine why fans of narrative-driven computer adventures would not want to see how this one plays out. Or else, wait for the forthcoming Toxic Crusaders beat 'em up.

SunnySide

Steam‌ ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ June 15
Developer:‌ RainyGames

SunnySide takes the core rhythms of cosy life games and drapes it in anime cloth. Set in a quiet town in the Japanese countryside, there's the obligatory farming, resource gathering, homemaking and socialising (yes, there's romance). Some aspects of your routine can eventually be automated, chiefly gardening: it may come as a relief to hear that watering systems exist in the SunnySide universe. Indeed, offering a modern spin on these chore aspects of life games is part of SunnySide's sales pitch, with the Steam page warning that "SunnySide is a Farm Sim with no watering cans, shipping containers, gift based socializing, mayonnaise machines, or endless walking". It also places a greater emphasis on a slowly unfolding narrative concerning the citizens of the town.

Messy Up

Steam‌ ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ June 14
Developers:‌ Liquid Meow

Here's another one of those pastel-hued local multiplayer games that have become very popular in the wake of Overcooked. This one has a premise that appeals to me: one team plays as pets, the other as humans. The pets' objective is to destroy the world, chiefly because their human owners aren't giving them enough attention, while the human team needs to put a stop to their pets' nefarious ways. There are various game modes, lots of pets to unlock, and the levels take place in varied locales such as home, the beach, the office, and a castle. Watching cats destroy things (that don't belong to me) never gets old.

Psychroma

Steam‌ ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ June 12
Developer:‌ Rocket Adrift

Psychroma is a neon-hued psychological horror sidescroller with some of the most meticulously detailed pixel art I've seen in a while. Set in a "haunted cybernetic house" somewhere in an unrecognisable future Toronto, you take the role of a drifter who has the peculiar skill of being able to experience time out of order. This strange house is a refuge of sorts for people rendered homeless by a ruthless housing crisis, and part of the appeal of Psychroma is the ability to absorb other inhabitants' "digital ghosts" to access their stories. This looks like a richly atmospheric experience, and there's a demo if you'd like to try it out first.

The Powder Toy

Steam‌ ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ June 15
Developer:‌ The Powder Toy Team

The Powder Toy has been around since 2008, but last week marks its first appearance on Steam. It's basically a particle physics sandbox with a huge emphasis on user-generated content, and with it you can simulate explosions, construct "miniaturized" power plants, and even build your own CPUs. Those are just the examples taken from Steam; the possibilities are limited only by your own curiosity. It's a weirdly powerful simulator, and a real labour of love, especially since it's completely free to download.

"I wanted to show that nature can still beat the machine and that there is still merit in real work from real creatives," the photographer told PetaPixel. "After seeing recent instances of AI-generated imagery beating actual photos in competitions, I started thinking about turning the story and its implications around by submitting a real photo into an AI competition."

Back in 2022, AI artist Jason Allen won first prize in the Colorado State Fair fine arts competition. An uproar followed, and we asked Allen for his thoughts. "I think the backlash is par for the course for any major advancement in technology as it pertains to art", he said. "Such was the case with the camera, threatening portrait artists in the past, where the guy 'didn't have to do anything except press a button.' Of course, we know that is ridiculous now, but it takes time to accept new eras of art advances."

Then in 2023 Boris Eldagsen won the creative open category in the Sony World Photography Awards before revealing his image was created by AI. "AI images and photography should not compete with each other in an award like this", he said at the time. "They are different entities. AI is not photography. Therefore I will not accept the award."

Eldagsen was trying to make the point that photography awards were not ready for AI, and he seems to have been right. The 1839 competition's judges include directors and managers from The New York Times, Christie's, Getty Images, and the Maddox Gallery, none of whom were able to tell the difference between an AI creation and a real photograph of a flamingo tucking its head away.

Speaking before Congress at the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee (via CNN), Microsoft President Brad Smith duly grovelled before law makers, conceding every failing highlighted in the US Cyber Safety Review Board's report.

"Microsoft accepts responsibility for each and every one of the issues cited in the CSRB’s report," Smith said. “We acknowledge that we can and must do better, and we apologize and express our deepest regrets to those who have been impacted.” 

Reportedly, the hack involved agents of China’s Ministry of State Security, who created digital keys allowing them to pose as any existing Microsoft customer. They then impersonated multiple organisations, including the U.S. Departments of State and Commerce, gaining access to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo’s emails.

Unsurprisingly, calls for Microsoft contracts to be dropped in favour of alternative vendors are on the up. But Smith argued that operating multiple vendors poses its own risks, because hackers can attack the "seams" where rival systems connect.

Exactly what "taking responsibility" means in this context is unclear. It's perhaps too much to hope Microsoft will refund its fees or resign from future contracts. That kind of thing would be to truly take responsibility.

Somewhat preposterously, Smith reportedly invoked Microsoft's farcical roll back of a major feature planned as part of its Copilot+ AI initiative for Windows as an example of the company's revitalised efforts to improve security.

The Recall recall, as it surely will be, well, recalled, means that a much touted AI feature that was due to be made available to all PC's with Copilot+ capability (in practice, currently only laptops with Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X chip, though Intel and AMD-powered laptops will follow later this year) will now be restricted to the more narrow tranche of users that are the members of the Windows Insider program.

"We are adjusting the release model for Recall to leverage the expertise of the Windows Insider community to ensure the experience meets our high standards for quality and security. This decision is rooted in our commitment to providing a trusted, secure and robust experience for all customers and to seek additional feedback prior to making the feature available to all Copilot+ PC users," Microsoft explained.

That followed outcry from security experts that the Recall feature, which among other actions takes screenshots of basically everything a PC user does every few seconds, would provide a treasure trove for anyone who had gained access to a PC for nefarious means.

Microsoft has already had to make changes to how Recall data is stored in response to criticism. One major change is that all Recall screenshots will now be encrypted, but it perhaps says a great deal about the company's attitude to security ad privacy that it thought a feature that sits in the background screenshotting everything and storing the raw images without a protection as obvious as encryption was a good idea.

Microsoft says it still intends to roll out Recall to all Copilot+ PC users "soon", but has not put a date on that rather ominous eventuality.

Since its announcement last month, the much-vaunted Recall hasn't been especially well received. I'm not sure who thought it would be a great idea to have a PC constantly keep track of everything you do on it but Microsoft has certainly promoted the AI tool rather heavily.

However, security and privacy concerns over the idea of a PC keeping snapshots and screenshots of it all in a local database. that anyone with access to the machine could potentially see, prompted Microsoft to announce changes to how the data would be kept safe.

But even that doesn't seem to have completely allayed fears and with the PC industry's hopes of flush bank balances, bolstered by sales of Copilot+ PCs, the software giant has changed tack on how the first version of Recall would be released. Initially, all Copilot+ owners would get it, starting June 18, but that's been dropped in favour of releasing it via the Windows Insider program first.

This is Microsoft's beta channel for Windows, letting members of the public get early versions of Windows updates to try out. Pavan Davuluri, Microsoft's Corporate Vice President for Windows and Devices, gave the reasons for this change in an updated blog:

"We are adjusting the release model for Recall to leverage the expertise of the Windows Insider community to ensure the experience meets our high standards for quality and security. This decision is rooted in our commitment to providing a trusted, secure and robust experience for all customers and to seek additional feedback prior to making the feature available to all Copilot+ PC users."

This will happen in "the coming weeks" and Microsoft still plans on making Recall available to all Copilot+ owners "soon"—your guess is as good as anyone's as to when that will be.

Whatever one feels about Recall, I think it's worth noting that Microsoft is at pains to remind us all that this is a preview version of the feature, even once it's widely released outside of the Insider program.

In the blog update, almost every mention of the omniscient AI tool is Recall (preview). I don't know about you but I'd prefer multi-billion dollar software companies to not use potentially unsuspecting members of the public as unpaid beta testers.

Yes, you'll have the option to disable Recall and never use it once, but I'd much prefer it if Microsoft didn't foist beta software onto everyday users in the first place. Microsoft needs to make downloading Recall entirely optional and not a compulsory update to the operating system. 

Microsoft's rapid changes in Recall's security features and roll-out show that it clearly cares about its public image, and by making it a fully optional application, it would go no small way to help improve the confidence users have of AI, Windows, and Microsoft itself.

Recall isn't something that I would ever use myself and everyone outside of PC Gamer that I've spoken with about Microsoft's AI tool has said the same. A tiny sample out of the millions of Windows users, of course, but I suspect that our thoughts are not uncommon.

After all, how many people are chomping at the bit to test out a beta application that constantly monitors and records your activity on a PC, even if you can tell it to ignore specific apps and websites?

Unsurprisingly, Discord's music bots were living on borrowed time—time which ran out in 2021, when Google issued cease-and-desists to the developers of popular music bots for violating YouTube terms of service and "using it for commercial purposes." Which like, yeah. Hard to argue against, unfortunately.

Among those culled in the great music bot purge was Rythm, which at time of death in September 2021 had boasted some 30 million users across 20 million Discord servers.  The writing had been on the wall for Rythm since August, when Google dropped the hammer on Groovy, another hyper popular music bot. Before the axe fell, Rythm's creator Yoav Zimet told The Verge that its developers were "working on something new."

Almost three years later, Zimet's foreshadowing is coming to fruition. Rythm is back from the dead, relaunching today not as an illicit bot peddling harvested YouTube audio, but—according to a press release—as "the world's first community-based group listening music platform." In other words, it's like Spotify if you could only use Spotify while in a Discord call with other people. Now one of Discord's built-in activities, Rythm offers synchronized music for servers and voice calls, but it requires a group to listen.

Evidently, Rythm spent the last three years chasing down music licensing deals and venture capital investments. While that sounds like the worst three years someone could possibly spend, it means your old music bot friend's gone legitimate. Of course, legitimacy comes with a cost: to freely host listening sessions from Rythm's music library, you'll need to pay five bucks a month for a premium Rythm subscription. Otherwise, free users are limited to listening to their premium friends' sessions or pre-curated radio stations from Rythm and premium subscribers.

It's nice to have an easy music option while hanging out on Discord, but I imagine what'll make or break the resurrected Rythm is how well its music catalog—around 50 million songs, the press release says—can provide music that people will actually want to seek out. I'll admit, that 50 million number is already more than I expected; for comparison, Spotify claims its catalog has something like 100 million songs. That's more than I could muster up in three years. And I've never gotten a DMCA from Google for sorta-stealing music, so you'd think it'd be easier for me.

Sadly, if you hope to use Rythm for listening solo, you'll only get a couple minutes' worth of music. Curious to see what kind of heat Rythm was bringing, I fired up the new Discord activity in a test server to see what was available. Choosing the "Sad Songs" curated radio station, I listened to two and a half songs—one from Lana Del Rey, one from an artist named "Juice WRLD"—before it paused the playback because I was listening without anyone else in the voice call.

"Rythm is for groups," a popup told me as I grew self-conscious of the fact that I was alone in a poorly-lit basement apartment. "You can continue adding songs and playback will continue when someone arrives." According to Rythm's website, even premium subscribers can't listen solo, because the group listening requirement "allows us to be cheaper than other music streaming services."

Ah, well. If you've got friends, you can fire up Rythm in Discord today. Rythm's also hoping to launch a standalone mobile app later this year, though presumably you'll still be unable to use it alone. 

The updates to Recall are covered in a Microsoft blog (via Ars Technica) and while the changes are only three in number, they're pretty significant ones. The first, and most important one of all, is that Recall is now completely optional.

During the first run of your new Copilot+ AI PC, during the Windows setup procedure, you'll be asked if you want Recall to be enabled. No prizes for guessing what most people will choose here.

Next, for added security, you'll need to use Windows Hello to enable Recall and also to view and search your timeline of PC activity recorded by Microsoft's AI feature. If you're unfamiliar with Windows Hello, it's a security function that uses a face-recognition camera, fingerprint scanner, or local PIN to access your PC or software.

Lastly, Microsoft is fully encrypting every snapshot of your PC that Recall takes, along with the search index database. These are all stored locally on your computer, rather than using a cloud service, but the main concern about Recall was that if anyone else logged into that same PC, the Recall data could potentially be accessed. With this update, snapshots will only be decrypted when unlocked via Windows Hello.

In the blog, Microsoft says that "even before making Recall available to customers, we have heard a clear signal that we can make it easier for people to choose to enable Recall on their Copilot+ PC and improve privacy and security safeguards."

To be frank, all of the updates should have been in place at the beginning. Microsoft said that Recall data was always encrypted but it wasn't specific to the snapshots and search index database, just that the entire disk would be using Bitlocker. Given that this encryption isn't 100% safe, the vast amount of personal information collected by Recall should have been additionally encrypted, or kept safe in some other way, right from the get-go.

Given that the public perception of AI isn't exactly stellar at the moment, Microsoft should have foreseen the reaction to the announcement of Recall and gone overboard with the security measures. A little more work may have gone a great deal of good for the feature's reputation.

We'll see how well the updates are received when Recall is finally shipped to customers with Copilot+ AI PCs on June 18. However, the AI tool will only be on those computers, so if you're using Windows 11 on an x86 desktop PC or laptop, Recall won't be available and Microsoft hasn't said anything about bringing the feature across to other platforms so far.

Recall first came to light in May as part of the Copilot+ suite of tools for Snapdragon X Series laptops. It takes and stores an image of your screen "every few seconds," the purpose being to make it easier (via the magic of AI) to find things you'd seen or been working on but have forgotten about: A funny tweet, a cool meme, or maybe that finance document you promised the boss you'd have finished yesterday.

Captured images are stored locally and aren't shared with other users or used for targeted advertising, but even so it struck me (and an awful lot of other people) as an obviously bad idea. It got even worse when it came to light that the system was really not all that secure: It was just days before researchers reportedly figured out how to bypass Windows' security to access the stored images.

In the wake of that, and widespread negative reaction to the idea in general, Microsoft has now partially reversed course. In an update posted today, vice president of Windows and devices Pavan Davuluri said users will be required to switch on Recall in order to use it, and doing so will require the use of the Windows Hello feature that enables sign-in via a PIN, fingerprint, or facial recognition. Additional security features aim to ensure Recall images are only accessible after authentication, and the search index database is also being encrypted.

Davuluri also reiterated the pre-existing privacy features of Recall, including that images are only stored locally and not shared, that an icon will provide a visual indicator when Recall is live, and that users will have full control over when Recall is running and what it's taking pictures of. 

He emphasized that point in comments about how internal testers at Microsoft are very enthusiastic about Recall: "People are taking advantage of the controls to exclude apps they don’t want captured in snapshots, from communication apps or Teams calls, or to delete some or all their snapshots," Davuluri wrote. "This is why we built Recall with fine-grained controls to allow each person to customize the experience to their comfort level, ensuring your information is protected and that you are in control of when, what and how it is captured."

That's all well and good, but I don't think it addresses the number-one concern felt by a lot of Windows users: I don't want my PC taking pictures of what I'm doing.

For me it's a matter of principle more than anything else (most of what I do is actually very dull) but there are times when I'm dealing with sensitive material (for work purposes, not porn, you weirdos) and I don't need the headaches that a leak would entail. 

And frankly, I don't care what your TOS says: If there's one thing we all should have learned by now, it's that online privacy is mostly just wishful thinking and good luck, and occasionally doing sensible things like, for one, not signing up for the digital panopticon. I don't care how you dress it up: There's no need to make corporate intrusion into our lives any easier than it already is.

If you do want to sign up for the digital panopticon for some reason, the "preview" release of Recall is set to ship on June 18. Note, however, that it will not work on standard PCs: Microsoft says Recall and other Copilot+ features "require powerful neural processing units (NPUs)—a specialized computer chip for AI-intensive processes—that are unique to the Copilot+ PC class of devices." In May, however, someone reportedly figured out how to get Recall working without an NPU, so maybe someday Microsoft will too.

Only Microsoft has a larger market cap, though the margins between it, Nvidia, and Apple are all very narrow. Well, if one can call tens of billions of dollars 'narrow.' For those unfamiliar with the term market capitalisation, it's a relative measure of how valuable a company is on stock markets, with the figure determined by a simple multiplication of the number of company shares by the current share price.

At the time of writing, Microsoft's shares sell for around $420, whereas Apple's are roughly half that figure. Nvidia, though, is deemed so valuable right now that buying just one of its shares will set you back over $1,200. That's almost enough to buy its best graphics card, the GeForce RTX 4090, though you'll still be short by $400 or so.

And it's all down to the fact that tech companies can't get enough of Nvidia's superchips, such as the Hopper H100 and the recently launched Blackwell range. These are monstrously huge and expensive processors (or in some cases, multiple processors) designed to handle the billions of calculations required for AI training and inference.

No retail prices exist for these products, as such, but you're looking at figures 20 times that of an RTX 4090 and companies like Meta, OpenAI, and X are buying hundreds of thousands of them. This is why revenues for Nvidia's data centre division have skyrocketed, with $22.5 billion being generated in the last three months—ten times that of its gaming division.

It's not just about revenue, though, as AMD will tell you. It took over $5.5 billion in revenue in the first quarter of this year but only saw a net income of $1 billion. For the same period, Nvidia's net income was a little under $15 billion from a revenue of $26 billion. It's not hard to see why its share prices have climbed so rapidly.

Profits alone aren't the only reason why Nvidia is now deemed the second most valuable company in the world. It's also about the fact that, at the moment, no other business can produce as many AI megachips as Nvidia, with the complete software stack and performance demanded by its customers. TSMC, the chip manufacturer that's contracted to fabricate all of Nvidia's Hopper and Blackwell processors, simply can't make enough of them to meet demand, either.

That demand shows no sign of tailing off any time soon, even though AMD and Intel are pushing ahead with humongous chips of their own. Amazon and Google make AI processors for their own needs, but OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, Tesla, and X don't. And they're all knocking at Nvidia's doors for its products.

Right now, Microsoft has the highest market cap of any company—$3.15 trillion—thanks to a combination of massive earnings ($62 billion in revenue, $22 billion net income, in the last quarter) and because it's throwing everything it can at AI. From Copilot+ PCs to privacy-concerning Recall, Microsoft wants AI to be a key part of every bit of software it churns out.

And as we've seen at Computex 2024, the majority of ancillary tech firms and hardware vendors are hot on Microsoft's tails, plastering AI onto motherboards, graphics cards, SSDs, and even power supply units, despite almost none of them actually using AI. That's not to dismiss the use of machine learning, as it has some clear applications and benefits in gaming, but no PSU is ever going to work better because of a neural network.

Artificial intelligence might not be making much of a difference to your life at the moment but for Nvidia, it's the road to becoming the most valuable company in the world.

"We already use the idea of neural graphics," said Jen-Hsun Huang in the Q&A session. "We can achieve very high-quality ray tracing, half tracing 100% of the time and still achieve excellent performance. We also generate frames between frames, not interpolation but frame generation. And so not only that, we generate pixels, we also generate frames."

Most PC gamers, especially those with an Nvidia graphics card in their rig, will know that AI is currently leveraged in games via DLSS—initially just an upscaling system but now comprising a frame generation system and a neural denoiser for cleaning up ray-traced images. In the case of DLSS Super Resolution, the upscaling isn't done by AI. That's handled by a normal shader routine but the resulting image is then scanned and corrected by a neural network.

In the case of DLSS Frame Generation, two previously rendered images, along with some other information from the rendering pipeline, get fed into a different neural network. This one has been trained on how motion affects images and the result is an entirely new frame, that gets inserted in between the other two frames.

It doesn't have to be a completed frame that can be upscaled or generated in this way, as textures are also a 2D grid of pixels. In theory, any data array could be processed by AI and then improved, making it higher in resolution. And that's exactly what Huang was referring to—taking meshes and textures, low in detail, and using AI to create better versions of them.

Huang agreed, saying "The future will even generate textures and generate objects and so that the objects will be lower resolution...textures can be low quality and generate higher quality. We can even compress it. So we're gonna get richer and richer games in the future."

By doing so, less VRAM is needed to store all the assets, less bandwidth is required to transfer them, and less time is required to create them in the first place. In short, developers can speed up the process of making a game and gamers potentially get more performance.

Nvidia's CEO went on to describe a scenario where you log on to your favourite multiplayer game and play a few rounds with some friends. At the moment, if you don't have enough people for a round, many games will drop a bot into the slot, but anyone who's played against bots in Counter-Strike 2 will know that they are seriously limited in scope. But what if you had an AI taking on that role instead? What if it acted so human-like, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference?

This is the future of gaming that Jen-Hsun Huang envisions: "Inside the games, all the characters will be there. Right? It's like having you go into A into A into a battle with six colleagues. And you know all those six colleagues, maybe two of them are real people. The other four are AIs, and they can play with you for a long time. So they actually remember you."

For some people, having everything AI-generated might be quite concerning or, at the very least, tantamount to being a 'fake' game. But consider this: upscaling has gone from being glitchy, weird, and very optional to something that's often completely transparent and automatically enabled by the average PC gamer. And that's just in five years.

It's not hard to imagine that in another five years, game developers will have access to an API that lets them generate high-resolution assets via the GPU, all without the player ever noticing it take place. Would anyone complain about this if it simply just worked?

Is an AI-powered NPC any different to a standard PC-controlled bot? Is an AI-improved character model any different to a mesh that's been improved via tesselation and geometry shaders? Would it matter that a neural network could be used to constantly check your PC and game, as well as how you play it and tweak everything behind the scenes to keep it all running as best as it could?

Or as Jen-Hsun Huang put it: "AI infused with all aspects of gaming and PCs."

We're far off the point where any games are powered this way, let alone all of them, so it is perhaps nothing to be even remotely concerned about right now. However, some might say that if the entire gaming PC ecosystem becomes dependent on AI, then consumers will become beholden to the hardware manufacturer(s) who have the capability of doing this the best.

Graphics cards are now one of the most expensive parts of any gaming PC and the cost of the most powerful ones is so high, that you could buy an entire mid-range rig for the same amount of money. If the best graphics or best performance in games is only possible on the most AI-capable graphics card, would the market become dominated by that particular vendor?

Of course, this is already the case, as Nvidia holds the majority share of the discrete GPU market and by pushing the use of ray tracing, upscaling, and frame generation in games, that's the direction it's all gone in, regardless of whether anyone wanted it to happen.

Let's just hope that when we're at the stage where a significant portion of a game is being generated by an AI in real-time, the gaming PC market has enough competition in it to keep prices under control. I'm really keen to see what the future of graphics and gaming is going to be like but I'd rather not be sitting on the sidelines, watching a select few enjoy such treats.